Faith of the Divine Inferno - Leslie Thompson (best short novels of all time TXT) 📗

into my mouth. Then because she could, she punched me in the face and laughed.
I was taken down a flight of stairs and into the basement were I was tossed unceremoniously into a small, empty room and left there. For a time I continued to struggle against the ropes, but no matter how I twisted and pulled, I only succeeded in giving myself a nasty burn. Joints aching and my mind exhausted, I sighed wearily, and I closed my eyes and went to sleep.
I awoke to find Mabel was crouched over me with her hands shoved deep into the pockets at the front of my pants. She saw me wake up and she pulled the gag out of my mouth.
“What are you doing?” I asked. My voice was harsh and dry from thirst and enraged screaming.
“Did you wonder how we managed to find you so easily?” Mabel showed me the bronze medallion she had taken off of me. “The Master told us how to make the medallions and how to use them. You see, the ones we left in your apartment were supposed to suck away your energy and make you weak so that you would be easier to catch. But you picked up the ones we had left in the cop’s house, and instead of making you easy to catch, it made the cop want to leave you to your own troubles and go away. But that didn’t work either, probably because that magic was meant for him. But the Master assured us that it didn’t matter in the end, so long as we picked our moment to strike.”
“What do you want?”
“What do you think we want, you moron?” Mabel laughed. “What would anyone want from you?”
“I don’t know. I have money, men, and secrets to the location of many historic objects…”
“Immortality and power,” Mabel finished impatiently for me. “Ryerson says that he can feel how powerful you are just by standing in the same room with you, but I’m not so sure. You can’t get out of those ropes and you were just as helpless as any mortal when I shot your throat out. If you ask me, you’re just as weak and pathetic as anyone else, even if you can’t die.”
“No one is asking you,” I replied, thinking that the girl was an idiot. She was completely unaware of what it meant for a woman my size to have the skills and constitution it took to kill three people with my bare hands. The fact that I can do that makes me very scary to anyone who has half a brain. But I have never gone wrong by letting an enemy underestimate me, so I didn’t bother to correct Mabel. I’d let the twit think what she wanted.
“You know, Shaw did pick up a medallion,” Mabel mused as she idly turned the medallion around in her fingers. “He took one of the ones from your bedroom. It was designed to make you weak and sickly so it would be easier to steal your life when the time came. Since he was the one who carried it, the medallion did its work on him and it had weakened him so much that it was almost embarrassing to see how fast he died.”
“What did you say?” My heart pounded painfully with shock and horror and my breath caught in my throat. I could feel the first cries of grief gather at the back of my throat while I searched Mabel’s face for some sign of a lie. But her features were tranquil and triumphant as she waited for my reaction to the news.
“You didn’t see it happen?” Mabel smiled at my agony and her dark eyes gleamed with joy. “All we had to do was shoot him once and he went down and bled like a stuck pig.” She tittered at her own joke, and continued on. “Personally, I would have thought that a man his size would need a bigger hole to take him out than what he got. If he hadn’t been crying when he did it, there would have been no satisfaction in killing him.” She gave me a searching stare that made her cruel smile so terrible. “We’re you in love with him?”
“I’m going to peel that pretty skin from your bones with my bare hands,” I snarled at her.
Mabel laughed and clapped her hands as if I’d promised her a favor she wanted. “I’ll take that as a yes. I can’t say that I can blame you though. He was a fine piece of ass, even if he wasn’t all that bright.”
She leaned down and ruffled my hair the way a man plays with his dog’s ears. I spat and strained against my bonds to get away from her touch. “I swear that I am going to kill you,” I seethed with so much rage that I spat the words out like poison. “When this is over, I am going to hunt you down and kill you so slowly that it will take years. I will make every second of it a living hell of agony and despair.”
“Well, it won’t be much longer. Reverend Ryerson will have everything arranged by tomorrow night, and he’ll have your immortality and you’ll be dead. Then you won’t have to feel sad anymore.” Mabel was unconcerned by my wrath. She believed that I would never get my hands on her. It didn’t matter in the end. I would show her what it meant to be eternal, and then she would know pain.
I didn’t want to contain the pain after that, and I sank into despair darker than any I had felt in a thousand years. My heart was breaking into a million pieces in my chest and a terrible sob escaped my lips. Where there is one, there is usually more, and soon I was hysterical and mindless in my grief. I cursed myself for letting the man make me love him and for being too stupid to recognize it in time to send him to safety. I eventually sank into fitful dreaming; realizing only then that the wretched music I was hearing was the sound of my own wailing.


Chapter 27

I lay in that little room for I don’t know how long. I don’t recall the details of my prison, though I suspect that there was very little to remember. If it had been me holding an angry immortal in my basement, I would have put her in a small room without windows, furniture, or even carpeting; so I assume that the Divine Inferno did the same. It didn’t matter in the end. I spent the hours dreaming sweetly of Shaw and then waking up to weep in despair for his loss.
I did not see Mabel again, which was just as well. If she had shown her face, I probably would have screamed at her like an animal and accomplished nothing useful. The little girl had gotten the better of me because I was careless and I had forgotten the most important rule of survival. There is always someone smarter, stronger, or more ruthless than I could be, and that I always had to have an escape plan when I encountered them. But I had been too caught up in myself and too distracted by a handsome man with a warm heart to pay attention to the sinister woman hiding behind a face of sweet innocence.
After hours of depressing solitude, my little cell suddenly became rancid with visitors. They came and went in twos and threes; some took clippings of my fingernails and locks of my hair while others washed my face and took small blood samples from my arms. Dorman came in to stare at me as if I was some kind of weird bug and to nudge me with the toe of his shoe. After a few minutes he left me alone, telling the guard at the door to check my ropes every hour to make sure that I couldn’t get away. The man did as he was told, sweating profusely from fear of me as he tugged at my ropes and scurried away.
I endured these small indignities without noticing any of it. It didn’t matter enough to me to do more than recognize that they were happening. I didn’t care what their schemes were. I had lost the battle before I even knew that it was happening and my heart was broken over my lost love. I knew that eventually I would come out of it enough to move on, and I didn’t believe that I could die, not really.
Slowly my thoughts turned to my recent failures, and in the grand tradition of all human beings, I flogged myself with them. How could I have been so blind to the world that I hadn’t noticed that there were faeries and demons wandering around? Why did they wait so long to make me aware of them? How could I have been so stupid? The only answer I could come up with was that I was a victim of my own hubris. I have been arrogant and selfish because I had believed that I was unique in the world and no one and nothing could keep me down. Now time and my newly found supernatural fellows have made a colossal dumb shit out of me. I almost hoped that the Divine Inferno could succeed in their plan to take me out. Maybe then I’d find the peace that old mortals are always going on about.
The door opened and two cult members carrying a semi-conscious man between them staggered in. The man was badly bruised and battered, but even so, I recognized Alejandro right away. His hands were cuffed behind him and his legs and feet dragged listlessly across the floor behind him. The men dropped him as soon as they got all of him into the room and then they turned and left. For a moment I almost felt bad that the poor guy had been sucked into this mess along with me, but then I remembered that he was a Child of Orpheus and that by joining the group he had asked for it. After that, I didn’t give a shit anymore.
“My lady,” Alejandro groaned as he struggled onto his side to look at me. His face was a mess of broken bones and hamburger. Whoever had beaten him had gone to a lot of effort to destroy his looks so that no surgeon, no matter how skilled, could ever repair the damage. He would lose consciousness soon, and then there was a good chance that he would die. “I am so sorry. We were there when you were taken and we didn’t help you because we wanted to be sure of our orders. The Divine Inferno will achieve their goal and Shaw was lost because of it. I’m so sorry.”
I didn’t accept or deny his apologies. In the emotional state I was in, I could barely comprehend his words. Perhaps one day I would bother to make them sensible in my mind and then consider my response. But for now I couldn’t bring myself to care. Alejandro had nothing more to say and he slipped into unconsciousness. A few moments after that, there was another round of cultist visitors who